Video transcript

So how do you approach a painting
that is so famous, that has become an
icon of a nation? We're looking at Grant Wood's
"American Gothic" from 1930 which more than any other painting
has come to represent America and Middle America and small-town America for many people. Wood said that this was a father
and a daughter, but we know that the models were his
dentist and his sister. It's as contested as
our nation is. It has as many readings as we have
ideas about what our country is. So in some ways it depends on which side
of the political spectrum you're on. If you're a city person, you think that
he's mocking the people who live in the Midwest, and if you're a Midwesterner, you think, oh,
he's one of us, and he captured who we are. Although the opposite could
also be true. The Easterners, perhaps, looked at these Iowans
represented in this painting, and said, "Ah, that's what they're like." And the Iowans sometimes looked at this
and we're worried they were being mocked. There's a lot of meaning in this painting. Okay, so we can look at it at face value
at its most simplified and see this farmer, see, perhaps, as the artist said,
his daughter, standing before their simple farmhouse. So there's a sense of hard-working,
practical people, a kind of conservative aspect of America. There's something archaic here. Everything in this painting does seem
homemade. The carpenter Gothic house in back of them,
the apron that the woman wears, his overalls, everything seems as if it could have been
made by these people. This is 1930, and the United States is an
intensely industrial culture. And even by Iowa standards, this painting is
a very archaic image But the quality that is most present here for me
is the confrontation with these figures. They stand right up in front of us. We're not sure what he's going to say. But I do get the sense that his face
is about to change, and he's either going to open up
with a smile, or there is going to be something fairly stern coming from him. It's hard to read him, actually. And I'm not sure that he's looking
directly at us. But whether he is stern or kind
seems to really be indeterminate. And she looks off at something we can't see, something outside of the space of the painting. In fact, that ambiguity, I think,
is pervasive throughout this painting. I think it's one of the reasons this painting
is, in fact, so powerful, and has become such a symbol
of the American heartland because people can see in it
what they want. I think it helps to know something
about Grant Wood himself. He grew up on a really remote farm
in a remote part of Iowa with his two brothers and sister
and his parents. He was really isolated. His father was very strict. He didn't really fit in with
his family. He had a kind of softer,
more artistic side to him than the masculine side of
his brothers and his father, and he was very close to
his mother. His father died young. So a complicated biography that I think
does make its way into this painting. Well, he is a complex figure. Sometimes we think of him as a kind
of two-dimensional figure, an Americanist, a Regionalist, the
American scene, that is, somebody who painted
from the heartland. These were his people. Grant Wood, along with Thomas Hart Benton,
and a number of other artists, are establishing what they're
calling Regionalism, what others call American
scene painting. That is, a figurative tradition
of the Middle West that speaks to American values. But he was a much more
complex figure. He spent a lot of time in Paris
as did most artists of his generation, painting in a semi-impressionist style. He also spent time in Munich. So he wasn't quite as American
as our idea of him, or the idea that this painting
gives us. In fact, art historians link the kind
of hard-edged style and the change from Impressionism to his having
absorbed the influence of early Northern Renaissance painters
like Van Eyck and Memling, and perhaps also the Neue
Sachlichkeit of contemporary German painting. Right, on his visit to Munich,
in the 1920s. And so this is a painter who is influenced
by European traditions, although he's turning those lessons
on his own people, on the American landscape, on the American pysche. We certainly see that influence of
the Northern Renaissance, I think, especially in the face of the male figure
where we have almost a map of this man's face with every wrinkle and crease. We can see the individual lines of
his eyebrows, for example. You can almost see where the pores
will allow the beard to emerge ultimately. I mean, there is a kind of specificity here
that is almost terrifying. And I think that specificity is in his face
and not so much in the rest of the picture. If you look at the trees in the background,
they've become rounded, geometric shapes that are generalized. And so the rest of the painting has
a sense of geometry, of lines and circles and zigzags. And there's a way that the artist
takes the specific and creates a kind of more universal form out of it. I think the trees are a perfect example of that. This is both real and symbolic. But I think it is important not to ignore
the broader context in which this work was made. This is 1930. The United States had recently gone through
one of its most prosperous moments, but just the year before, 1929, the stock
market crashed, and the economy stalled. If you think about the broader political
situation, you have in Europe the fascists just beginning to take power,
and there is an important political ideology that goes with that, which is often speaking
of going back to a kind of rural, primitive experience. And so some art historians have looked at
this American scene painting and seen a kind of echo of anti-internationalism
that was seen as very dangerous, and in a sense the root of
European fascism. I suppose as patriotism itself, this painting
has been read in a whole bunch of different ways. It's had psychoanalytic readings. It's had political readings. And it's had kind of historical readings. And I think it is important to embed this painting
in not only the artist's biography but also the historical moment in
which it was made.